Cisco Introduces Rackmount Servers

1sockchuck writes "After shaking up the market for blade servers, Cisco Systems is launching a line of rackmount servers. But the company says its ambitions are more targeted than a full-scale 'all your racks are belong to us' assault on the volume server market. Cisco says it sees its 1U and 2U C-Series rackmount servers as offering an entry point to its Unified Computing System vision for companies who've built their data centers using rackmount servers instead of blades. But it thinks many customers will like the expanded memory capacity Cisco has built into the Xeon 5500/Nehalem EP processor."

Comments

Sorry Cisco

[DigiShaman]

You're a day late and a dollar short.

This market is already cornered by the likes of Dell, HP, and VMWare. Feel free to try in the market place however, but I think it's a big waste of your capitol and R&D.

Re:Sorry Cisco

[Anonymous Coward]

This market is already cornered by the likes of Dell, HP, and VMWare.

One of the things that Cisco gains by doing this is the elimination of their need to re-label HP Proliant servers for their IP telephony server products, and there are many very large companies that use such, have standardized on Cisco hardware, and will buy them.

Re:Sorry Cisco

[swb]

Is Cisco actually designing the motherboards, or is it like many HP servers were, just badged boards from ServerWorks or the like?

I would guess whatever makes it special has nothing to do with system specs but has everything to do with software loaded either into the hardware or onto the hosts that drives networking.

Re:Sorry Cisco

[Anonymous Coward]

You're a day late and a dollar short.

You underestimate the power of collusion between Cisco and Gartner. My employer recently spent OODLES above and beyond that of a more reliable and featureful PBX in order to adhere to Gartner's "single source" recommendation. It doesn't matter if it costs more - it *has to be better* if it allows you to consolidate suppliers.

It really hurts me to go in to work every day knowing that I work for idiots. Instead of a 1U PBX server that just sat there untouched for TWO YEARS, now we have 20U (6 unique boxes total) that need all sorts of poking and prodding.

Cisco knows that they can just buy some high-end hookers for the people who make the big decisions, period. They really don't care if the quality is there. I'm there to hold the bag for them when the shit hits the fan.

Re:Sorry Cisco

[mcrbids]

You're a day late and a dollar short.

You don't understand how this "free market economy" works, do you?

All that's needed for Cisco is to sell more product than it costs them to make. That's called profit. So long as they make a profit, it's a good move. If they don't sell enough, then it's a short-lived moved.

The fact that you named so many vendors (Dell, HP, VMWare) makes it clear that it's still an *open* marketplace, and that there is still competition. Thus, it's not "cornered" by any stretch. In fact, not only have I *never* purchased hardware from any of the vendors you name, one of the vendors doesn't even sell hardware! (when did VMWare get into the hardware business?)

Personally, I welcome another hat thrown into the fray! The only possible thing that could come of this is lower prices, better quality, and more likely both. Predicting their demise as they enter the marketplace, when they are one of the most well-known and trusted brands in IT is just a tad premature.

Re:Sorry Cisco

[Nefarious Wheel]

Branding is important, especially when the brand name is written into contracts. There might be fewer hoops to jump through if you can single-source a solution where a single vendor is named. This lives in a place I call "procurement space".

Re:Sorry Cisco

[Anonymous Coward]

So long as they make a profit, it's a good move

It's only a good move if the profit made provides the highest NPV. Or, for a simple example. If a company spends $1m on a project that nets a dollar in a year, that's a bad move, because they could have put that $1m into government bonds and gotten at least 3% ($30k).

So profit != good. Maximum profit given available options = good.

These look cool - but not for RAM

[symbolset]

More RAM isn't a big deal - the 5500 series from everybody else goes up to 172GB now, and will be at least double that soon. That's plenty for now.

The density is only 1/4th that of HP's new DL1000 (video).

Interconnect is what gives these Cisco servers their shine.

Re:These look cool - but not for RAM

[symbolset]

I'm not Bill Gates. 640K might have been enough for anybody back then, but if he had only said "for now", we wouldn't be having this talk. I have opinions and I'll share them. Most of the time after a few years the market agrees with me.

We're in the technology singularity. Stuff has already gotten silly and it's about to get absurd.

Long before the aforementioned RAM quantity becomes a bottleneck for 99.9% of uses you're going to need faster RAM, a faster CPU (or more CPUs) to talk to it, more channels to talk to it with. We're half a year away from 8 cores per CPU, and 9 months away from 12 cores at most and those platforms are going to come with more RAM channels, and hence even more RAM per server, even without considering that DIMMs are going to hit 16GB soon. Likely it will be much sooner. Between now and then we'll need faster interconnects for inter-node communications, faster storage like this, and faster networking like FCoE (tomorrow, literally). As much as I hate the waste of throwing out year old servers, software makers are making it an imperative by insisting on licensing that defeats the technology value proposition. It may not even be wasteful as each server increment does twice as much with half the power. People who use this stuff are well paid to replace the hardware that lives under these limits frequently because the software costs at least 4 times as much as the hardware.

/and yes, if you use open software you don't have this problem - but you're usually paying per server for support, and that amplifies the incentive to throw out your old gear every year.

The economic contraction has turned out to be the harsh winter that brings forth a summer of great fruit. Everybody in the trade is emptying their cupboard of innovation in the hope of gaining market share, rather than holding it in reserve for a rainy day. Because it's raining now.

What we need now is services that need this extra gear. If somebody doesn't come up with it soon Google's going to shrink down to 90 individual racks in somebody else's datacenters - three per geographic area.

//And no, we're not dumb enough to burn these cycles running the server version of Vista. We get paid to be useful.

Re:These look cool - but not for RAM

[Euzechius]

I work for Cisco, so this post is biased.

If you want to know more about Intel Nehalem 55xx architecture.

It explains that a the server manufacturer using the Intel Nehalem 55xx processor can support up to 3, 6 or 9 DIMMs/socket. This corresponds with a memory bus speed of 1333, 1066 or 800Mhz. The latter is not often implemented and would give you (9x2x8GB) 144GB in a dual socket system.

What Cisco did is, developing a patented "memory switch" which presents up to 4 DIMMs as 1 to the processor, MULTIPLYING THE ALLOWED RAM TIMES FOUR. If the memory is running at 1066Mhz this gives you 48DIMMs. If the memory is running at 800Mhz this would allow up to 72 DIMMs in one server. The latter one has not been implemented.

Where would you ever need this kind of memory?

* Running VMware ESX, XenServer,... and assuming 3-4GB per VM -> imagine 96 VMs per physical box
* imagine running a 300GB MySQL database out of RAM without the need of a high end machine

Also the price per GB is not linear for memory. 8GB costs currently way more than 4x 2GB. So if you still don't need the 384GB memory, you can fill the 48DIMMs with 2GB and have a 96GB RAM server for a lower price.

There are also a lot of other features which are really different and better than the competition, such as centralized management per 320 servers. In more enterprise environments customers can also consolidate their SAN and their LAN network by using open standard FCoE.

Please check it out at Cisco - Unified Computing System

Re:These look cool - but not for RAM

[TheSunborn]

How much (If any?) extra latency does the switch add? It's not the first time someone tries something like this but the latency normally might be so bad that you might just want to buy an other server instead. (Unless it's a database server, because even slow ram is much faster then the disk :}

Re:In other news

[JustinRLynn]

Congratulations. In addition to the above story we now have to be subjected to that awful jingle. Could you have at least made some obscure reference to a geeky movie made in the eighties? Spatula city, perhaps?

Take that, HP!

[binaryspiral]

HP used to provide hardware for Cisco's appliances and servers that they resold as Cisco branded gear... Call Managers and the like.

Well, HP's been really pissing off Cisco by selling ProCurve switches with lifetime warranties and converting Cisco Catalyst switch users over to HP ProCurve customers. Cisco's been losing all this SmartNet gravy that they wallow in year after year. So this is their answer... sell servers to piss in HP's very large bowl of Cheerios.

Good luck Cisco, you're entering a cut throat market with well established hardware vendors in a global recession... You've either got a large pair of brass balls or you're just really really stupid.

Re:Take that, HP!

[BBTaeKwonDo]

When a company has over 30 billion dollars in liquid assets (Excel warning), entering a market that's closely related to the one it's currently in does not classify as ballsy, even if said market has competitors.

Re:Take that, HP!

[teh_c0unt]

Good luck Cisco, you're entering a cut throat market with well established hardware vendors in a global recession... You've either got a large pair of brass balls or you're just really really stupid.

is cisco not a well established hardware vendor? http://www.thestreet.com/story/10508379/1/tech-rumor-of-the-day-juniper-cisco.html

Way to enter the market with a splash, Cisco...

[TD-Linux]

Seriously, Cisco? Yet another boring Xenon server? There are so many out there I can't tell the difference.

You could have done something unique and interesting... throw a couple ARM Cortexes into a ultra-low-power 1U server... and make it completely redundant, just for kicks. Or you could have integrated something you are good at, like, well... I guess that option is becoming slimmer.

Anyway, cheers for yet another undistinguished product entering a crowded market aimed at legacy users with falling demand.

Makes a lot of sense to me

[Bluecobra]

I think this is a great thing for Cisco. Okay, so nobody will buy their servers for regular stuff. But they will buy Call Manager servers and the like. At work we have 3 Cisco servers that are re-branded IBM boxes. One is for our Unity voicemail system and the other two are for Callmanager. When there are hardware issues, I need to call Cisco who then calls IBM to fix it. I think from a support perspective, it would be a huge benefit to actually MAKE the servers you are supporting that way support requests get processed more efficiently. Cisco doesn't just have IBM servers either, they have HP as well so that would be two vendors that they don't need to deal with anymore for support.

Re:Makes a lot of sense to me

[afidel]

Yeah instead of working with HP/IBM to support their servers they are going to have to train all their field engineers how to properly service and diagnose their new server line. Oh and IBM announced a big deal with Brocade for FC gear the day after the launch of Cisco's blade servers, I wonder how much revenue they will make on the servers vs what they are going to lose in other markets by pissing off all their partners. Unless you have a lot of clueless CTO type get snowballed by the Cisco rep I really don't see these things going anywhere.

why didn't they buy sun?

[speculatrix]

I'm surprised Cisco didn't simply buy Sun Microsystems - a reputation for making expensive, over-engineered hardware (both).

It's only a small step for Linksys to move from making NASs and media players/extenders to PCs, so I expect we'll see a Linksys version of some of the small eee desktop etc.